Search engines as weapons and why Europe should build one.
Google has the lion’s share of the search engine market. There are regions, such as China, where this is not the case, but for the most part, Google rules the market. This is a bizarre situation for any product, which is precisely what Google’s search engine is. The right to use Google’s algorithms is bought in exchange for your data. You have made a rather peculiar purchase, where instead of money you have offered your information. Regardless of the rules of the transaction, the fact remains that you are buying a service — a product. Whether the price is right it remains to be seen.
Try and think of another product or service, with the exception of certain drugs, that is global and yet is a monopoly. There is an alternative source for nearly everything that you use or consume. Of course, there are state monopolies, e.g. a single electricity utility, but in this case, a government has decided to manage their power supply the best way they saw fit. At the government level, there are options for multiple sources of power and even power imports from other countries. There is no global monopoly on power. Since power has strategic value, a government may treat this as a public good that deserves extra attention. Similar arguments can be put forward for health, education, transport, and defense. These are all services that are too large to be handled by a corporation and too important to be left in the hands of a few powerful individuals.
Yet, the one tool that we use dozens of times a day, for tasks ranging from the trivial (looking for cat gifs) to the most important (take your pick — many people even research medical symptoms) is in the hands of a few shareholders of a single corporation. We are all very happy to use this tool because we inadvertently believe the following, special, rule:
The corporation (Google) will always look out for the interests of its users.
Corporations look out for the interests of their owners and perhaps their clients, not their users. Don’t forget that just because you use the search engine, you don’t qualify as a client. This rule is made up. It is a convenient cover story to justify a very useful service. It helps us sleep easy.
The advertisers pay Google’s bills, and therefore they are the clients. The users are products dressed up as pseudo-clients.
Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against Google. I wish I came up with the idea and I honestly consider myself lucky to be living in a time that such a tool exists. I argue that this is such a tremendously significant tool that we have to have credible alternatives. We need alternative solutions not just because of the model that drives Google (you are the product — yet you assume to be the client) but also because Google is just a company. All companies eventually fail and google will be no exception.
Mars — the only alternative
Google’s size is probably enough to put anybody off from considering the possibility of starting a competitive venture. Honestly, why bother? Any attempt is doomed to fail or just get bought (which results in a monopoly again). People with lots of resources opt for projects like colonizing Mars, rather than get involved in a struggle to come up with a better search engine. I guess the probability of spending time on Mars is higher than building a new search engine. The odds don’t look that great, hence people steer clear.
So this is a dead-end, and it looks like the world has given up. It seems that the common wisdom is along the lines of: ‘Well, we have a search engine, let’s thank our lucky stars and pretend that it will always be there to serve us — oh, and it won’t bias the results to serve a special interest’. Something similar happened with banks. The banks did offer a great service until their owners decided to take greater risks, sell us more products (loans) and then finally fail. Then they held their ‘get out of goal card’: too big to fail! Therefore should be rescued (by the same people they let down). If google is not too big to fail then I don’t know what is.
Weaponized information
The sole purpose of a weapon is to wield power. Rockets, guns, and slingshots are all created not so much for destroying living things, but for forcing others to follow our will. A weapon’s strength lies not in its destructive power, but in its potential for destruction. That potential can be achieved with means other than a traditional weapon. Information can be weaponized and used for forcing somebody’s hand in a similar way as a traditional weapon. Look at how political events are influenced by social media. We have reached a point where corporations have information on our moves, our friends, our likes and dislikes. The information is not necessarily used against us, but it is recorded. It is a loaded gun waiting to go off.
Weaponized information does not have to be employed in the traditional sense of forcing individuals to follow a certain action. This is too crude a method with hardly any moral capital. There is a more subtle way of exercising power: Appeal to the masses. Demagogues have done this for millennia, and now we do not need a charismatic individual any longer. We have direct, personalized access to all individuals. Knowing users’ preferences and through trial and error (call it machine learning or any other fancy term) it is possible to influence groups of like-minded people. The problem of power has shifted from the arena of demagogues to that of mathematics. Appealing to the masses legitimizes the cause since the true motives are hidden behind the veil of democracy. If half of the population voted for a complete idiot willing to just follow the money, then it must be right. After all, it was a democratic process. The fact that these were vulnerable groups that were bombarded with propaganda and over simplistic arguments is only a footnote.
Since data can be used as a weapon, then perhaps we ought to look at it the same way we look a defense.
Defense, a good example of money spent just because we decided so.
As far as I know, most countries organize their armies at the national level. It is not that common to come across an army that belongs to an individual, and if you do, then there is something seriously wrong (run fast now!). Also, nobody owns a fighter jet as an individual. In fact, there are not that many countries that produce fighter jets. Buying a fighter jet is not just a purchase of equipment, it is an alliance between the two parties. Military power is so important that governments plan it at the highest level. The defense expenditure ranks as high as education and health. This is because we, the citizens, recognize that having freedom from our potential enemies (a rather non-tangible good in many countries of the west) requires sacrifices of a high order. There is the political will to spend money and therefore budgets are allocated.
There is no political will to secure our data resources and therefore no money is allocated towards it. I do not have the faintest idea how much it would take to put together a decent search engine, but I assume that a few billion dollars should do it. Who has the cash reserves and the motivation to pursue the task though? Frankly, it seems almost too large an undertaking for a single country, but probably a decent size project for the European Union.
The European Achilles heel
Christian Wiediger)
Europe appears to lag in every technological respect compared to its transatlantic cousin. Although Tim Berners-Lee, a Brit, invented the world wide web in Europe, the Americans soon took over and turned an idea into a world economy. Europe lacks the American risk aptitude, is a fragmented market and does not have a strong central government. Bureaucracy is the norm, followed by bickering, followed by failure. It does though possess a budget that allows for grand projects and can muster enough support to spend what is required for a project of the search engine magnitude. I am not sure though that there are politicians sufficiently informed and motived to rise to such a task. I’d love to talk to whoever makes such decisions!
Treat data resources like defense
I am certain that should google go down right now the world would still carry on. The same holds for the internet in general, the power grids and even health care. The only thing that would stop the world is a meteorite or a black hole that decided to gobble us up. So what would happen if you lost your ability to search the internet or if all the data that you have provided was weaponized? The answer evades me. I would expect though that a major disruption to the economy combined with a political shift and the emergence of an alternative search engine would be a likely outcome. Similarly, if you did not have an army, the invasion from your hostile neighbor would most likely result in casualties, perhaps the loss of identity but nonetheless, the world would not end and power would eventually be restored. This is a relaxed approach to getting invaded that nobody can accept. The risk of losing the power to rule yourself, and others, drives the defense spending. Why is it that the dependence of the world economy on a single company does not trigger alarm bells when the mere suspicion of political power loss would result in an almost unlimited defense spending?
History not to the rescue
Defense budgets are history driven. Past experience has shown that whoever has the technological edge can rule the world. The data-ammunition is a relatively new resource. We do not have any great examples of what happened to a nation / civilization once they lost control of their data (or do we with the election of Trump and possibly Brexit?). Perhaps we need a small disaster so that there can be an entry in the history annals which marks the first major data breach incident. Then we may reconsider and come up with the resources.
